The literature of Spanish America is far better known than it was when this Introduction was first published. Two very different writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, have helped to break the barrier of silence around the culture of the continent; the first is now a cult figure whose ‘fictions’ have attracted a massive and diverse body of comment and criticism; the second is the best selling – and probably the best-read – novelist ever to come out of Latin America.

The writing of Neruda, Paz, Fuentes, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sábato, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Manuel Puig and many others are now readily accessible to the general public – a sign that Latin America is no longer merely the consumer of cultural products but a producer. This alone justifies the emphasis of this Introduction on the social, historical and political context of literature if ‘Spanish-American literature’ is not simply to mean the appropriation of a few writers into some honorary Western establishment.

A great deal has happened in Latin America since 1969 – the appearance of a variety of new novelists and poets which promises much for the future, the publication of important new works by Cardenal, Neruda and others and also the tragic deaths of Neruda and of José María Arguedas. These and recent events which have had repercussions on culture inevitably suggest changes and additions which I would like to have made (but couldn't, at this stage, for technical reasons).